General > RANT

And now, on a lighter note......

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Testlund:

--- Quote from: EricL ---'Whiteness' is a farily recent adaptation in Homo sapians...
--- End quote ---

Is it really? I whould have thought that black and white people evolved at the same time, from a hairy ancestor. Hehe.  

I whould have imagined that people who stayed in Africa turned black over time to be better protected from the sun.

EricL:
Light skin color is a high-lattitude adpatation which allows more light to enter the skin, helping vitimin D production amoung other things.  The consensus view is that it did not evolve until relatively recently and only after Homo sapiens left Africa, which did not happen until about 100k years ago.

The consensus on hairyness is that it can come and go, and may have done so many times over the course of our evolution (which is what you would expect as a pretty useful adpatation to changing climate conditions) but that a good deal of our most recent hair loss predates (by a lot) our ancestors exit out of Africa.  Therefor, the consensus is that all our ancestors were dark skinned until recently when they left Africa (for those of us descended from populations which did in fact leave Africa) and light skin only evolved recently as a result of sleection pressure in high-lattitude populations (Northern Europe, Scandanavia).

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